Telephone Game

A chain of five agents where each reads only the previous agent’s output, never the original prompt. Compare the final output to the starting message to measure how much (or how little) meaning drifted across five hops.

What it demonstrates

Long sequential chains and accumulated working.* context
Why careful writes: path design matters — each hop is traceable
How meaning degrades (or holds) under repeated paraphrase
Reusing the same agent definition across multiple nodes

Run it

sirenspec run docs/cookbook/telephone-game/workflow.yaml
# Try your own starting message:
sirenspec run docs/cookbook/telephone-game/workflow.yaml \
  --input "A short, fact-dense sentence of your choice."

Compare working.hop_1 through working.hop_4 against output.final in the trace to see drift at each step.

Workflow

docs/cookbook/telephone-game/workflow.yaml

version: "0.1"

agents:
  relay:
    model: "openai:gpt-4o-mini"
    system: |
      You will receive a message. Restate it in your own words — change the
      phrasing, sentence structure, and vocabulary completely, but preserve
      the core meaning. Do not add, remove, or invent any facts. Reply with
      only the restated message, nothing else.

nodes:
  hop_1:
    agent: relay
    writes: working.hop_1
  hop_2:
    agent: relay
    writes: working.hop_2
  hop_3:
    agent: relay
    writes: working.hop_3
  hop_4:
    agent: relay
    writes: working.hop_4
  hop_5:
    agent: relay
    writes: output.final

edges:
  - from: hop_1
    to: hop_2
  - from: hop_2
    to: hop_3
  - from: hop_3
    to: hop_4
  - from: hop_4
    to: hop_5

guardrails:
  - injection
  - length

Basics

Multi-Agent Patterns

Swrm & Fan-Out

Factory & Iteration

Guardrails

Human in the Loop

Budget & Cost Control

Stress Tests

Tool Nodes

What it demonstrates

Run it

Workflow

Graph

Next steps

Compression Gauntlet

Sequential Pipeline

​What it demonstrates

​Run it

​Workflow

​Graph

​Next steps

Compression Gauntlet

Sequential Pipeline

What it demonstrates

Run it

Workflow

Graph

Next steps